Biological process

Biological process

A biological process is series of events accomplished by one or more ordered assemblies of molecular functions. Examples of broad biological process terms are cellular physiological process or signal transduction. Examples of more specific terms are pyrimidine metabolic process or alpha-glucoside transport. It can be difficult to distinguish between a biological process and a molecular function, but the general rule is that a process must have more than one distinct steps.

A biological process is not equivalent to a pathway; at present, GO does not try to represent the dynamics or dependencies that would be required to fully describe a pathway.

Further information can be found in the process ontology documentation.